Charles Clarke analyses Labour's alienation of voters (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Labour has alienated many of the key supporters who brought it to power in 1997, says former Home Secretary Charles Clarke.
...
Mr Clarke points to five fault lines for Labour:
- Failure to reach a deal with local councils on the division of local and central responsibilities, putting "a distance" between ministers and councillors and others
- Concerns among the business world, much of which swung behind Labour in 1997, about regulation, tax, value for money in public services and failure to adopt the euro
- Lack of confidence among environmental campaigners in the party's commitment to green issues
- Doubts about the party's determination to complete constitutional reforms, such as changes to the House of Lords, and fears for civil liberties amid anti-terrorism legislation
- The government's approach to Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East "has alienated many".
Mr Clarke also criticised Labour's decision-making over the next generation of nuclear power plans and the decision to replace the Trident nuclear weapons system.
In a side-swipe at the way Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have addressed the two issues, he says: "They cannot simply be dealt with as an aside at the CBI's annual dinner or a half-sentence at the Guildhall."
The first "fault line" is irrelevant, and the second to fourth are not that significant, except for the wholesale removal of civil liberties (which only arouses the ire of a few). What really matters is Iraq. If Blair had not been so stupid as to get Britain sucked into that illegal war, then the government would still be doing quite well. But he was that stupid.
Tories want to raise more money from so-called green taxes (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
More money would be raised from "green" taxes under a Tory government, shadow chancellor George Osborne has said.
He told the Financial Times he was "completely open-minded" about the measures he would bring in, but it was clear more revenue should be generated.
He will ride on a magnetic train during a trip to Japan, and said such trains could "virtually eliminate domestic flights" if brought into the UK.
Environmental campaigners have been pressing for new taxes on aviation.
Mr Osborne would not specify exactly how he would increase the proportion of revenue taken from "green" taxes during an interview with BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
"Of course there are different options. You can tax cars - we've already got fuel duty and vehicle excise duty," he said.
"There's the whole issue of taxing aviation. There are things like landfill taxes; there is the climate change levy, which I think should be replaced by a carbon levy on industry."
Since there are no firm proposals it is all hot air. But at least one politician seems to have admitted that car drivers already pay a carbon tax (and nobody else does). If carbon production should be the basis underlying so-called green taxes, then the only fair principle is that all sources of carbon pay the same rate of tax (per kg of carbon equivalent produced). It is ridiculous to tax one activity (e.g. car driving) at an extortionate rate and other activities (e.g. heating houses) with practically a zero rate (which is the Lib Dem policy).
On the magnetic train front, this is just the latest example of politicians trying to pick industrial winners, when history fully shows they are completely hopeless at that. It was claimed on the radio that these trains could get from London to Manchester in 45 minutes. Great, now London commuters can live in Manchester, what a great advance in life that would be. Creating (and no doubt vastly subsidising) these trains will just encourage people to live further and further from their workplace, which is hardly "sustainable".
(Also, if you are going to talk "green" you ought to at least walk the talk. What on earth is Osborne thinking by taking a junket to Asia? With just this one trip he will be responsible for a large amount of greenhouse gas emissions. Go to the back of the class. Of course the ruling elite, including the so-called environmentalists, do not want to make any sacrifices, they want the ordinary people of Britain to make the sacrifices.)
Kids should be forced to have countryside classes (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Countryside classes should become a compulsory part of the national curriculum, according to a magazine.
Country Life made the call as part of its manifesto to protect and save Britain's countryside.
They believe children living in cities need a better understanding of how the countryside works.
Does Country Life (the magazine for very rich people who are or want to pretend to be residents of country house estates) run the very same article every N years? Britain's countryside does not need "saving" by the people who want to save it. Countryside classes (which no doubt would be some politically correct mush) should not "become a compulsory part of the national curriculum", there are far, far more important subjects to teach kids.
American not allowed to wear t-shirt with Arabic slogan on a plane (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
An architect of Iraqi descent has said he was forced to remove a T-shirt that bore the words "We will not be silent" before boarding a flight at New York.
Raed Jarrar said security officials warned him his clothing was offensive after he checked in for a JetBlue flight to California on 12 August.
Mr Jarrar said he was shocked such an action could be taken in the US.
US transport officials are conducting an inquiry after a complaint from the US Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
JetBlue said it was also investigating the incident but a spokeswoman said: "We're not clear exactly what happened."
Mr Jarrar's black cotton T-shirt bore the slogan in both Arabic and English.
He said he had cleared security at John F Kennedy airport for a flight back to his home in California when he was approached by two men who wanted to check his ID and boarding pass.
Mr Jarrar said he was told a number of passengers had complained about his T-shirt - apparently concerned at what the Arabic phrase meant - and asked him to remove it.
He refused, arguing that the slogan was not offensive and citing his constitutional rights to free expression.
Mr Jarrar later told a New York radio station: "I grew up and spent all my life living under authoritarian regimes and I know that these things happen.
"But I'm shocked that they happened to me here, in the US."
After a difficult exchange with airline staff, Mr Jarrar was persuaded to wear another T-shirt bought for him at the airport shop.
"We Will Not Be Silent" is a slogan adopted by opponents of the war in Iraq and other conflicts in the Middle East.
It is said to derive from the White Rose dissident group which opposed Nazi rule in Germany.
Unbelievable, and what you might expect given the hysteria engendered by Bush and Blair over the so-called war on terror. The slogan "We Will Not Be Silent" is particularly apt because Bush played (and still plays) the patriotism card over the so-called war on terror and for a long time managed to silence any criticism from Congress and the mainstream media about his illegal and incompetent invasion of Iraq. (Blair on the whole uses different terror propaganda, because the British public are not fooled by the patriotism card.)
Google will allow some books to be downloaded for free (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Search engine Google plans to offer consumers the chance to download and print classic novels free of charge.
The firm's book search tool will let people print classics such as Dante's Inferno or Aesop's Fables, as well as other books no longer under copyright.
Until now, the service has only let people read such books on-screen.
Google's book search service stems from a wider project to put books online in a searchable format, which it is undertaking with major universities.
An inevitable step forward for Google. On the other hand, you cannot print out these books "free of charge", you have to pay for the paper and ink, and (surprise, surprise) if you want a paper version it is probably still cheaper to buy a copy second-hand or even new (assuming one is available, and with the advent of Amazon it usually is).
Man who made video of London Eye found innocent of being a terrorist (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
A minicab driver has been cleared of making or possessing a video of potential terrorist targets in London.
His film, shot at night, featured "high profile" sights including Big Ben, the London Eye and Park Lane hotels.
Iraqi Rauf Mohammed, 26, told Woolwich Crown Court the video had been shot as a tourist souvenir.
Mr Mohammed, of Forest Gate, east London, also said footage of him saying leaders, including Tony Blair, should be "slayed" had been meant as a joke.
Mr Mohammed's film, which was made in 2003, featured images of the high security Paddington Green police station where terrorist suspects are held.
It was shot as he drove around London listening to music about martyrdom but was described by the defence as evidence of a "silly" sense of humour.
Prosecutor Mr Paul Taylor claimed the film was designed to help terrorists "plan and carry out an attack on the capital".
Welcome to Blair Country, where people can be brought to court on rather spurious "terrorism" charges. Perhaps the chap was not entirely innocent, but the prosecutors evidently had a fairly weak case. You can imagine many people not saying very polite or politically correct things about Blair in private. And the idea that videos of Big Ben and the London Eye were treated as statements about anything is rather scary. Almost any tourist in the UK could be brought up on "terrorism" charges if such videos (or still photos) were allowed to be taken as evidence. Of course in Blair Country, only Muslims (and Brazilians and other non-whites mistaken as Muslims) need fear being labelled as terrorists.
Older patients allegedly not getting proper meal help (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Nine out of 10 nurses say they do not always have time to help ensure hospital patients eat properly, a study has found.
The charity Age Concern believes this could be one reason why six out of 10 older patients are at risk of becoming malnourished while in hospital.
The charity said the NHS was continuing to fail patients despite guidelines which make feeding a core priority.
Malnutrition is estimated to cost the UK over £7.3bn a year.
...
Gordon Lishman, Age Concern director-general, said: "Hospitals are in danger of becoming bad for the health of older people."The majority of older patients are being denied some of the basic care they need, leaving hundreds of thousands malnourished.
"Food, and help with eating it, should be recognised by ward staff as an essential part of care, and they should be given time to perform this task."
Age Concern is calling for protected mealtimes during which all non-urgent activity is suspended.
There's nothing new in the statement that "hospitals are in danger of becoming bad for the health of older people". If you want to die, you go to a hospital. Then again, the proffered solution is mainly, surprise, surprise, to spend more money (you need more nurses to do most of what Age Concern wants). The amount of money spent on the NHS has spiralled upwards in recent years, but no matter, there is always some special interest group (armed with statistics which they themselves have generated) which wants yet more spent. And do nurses believe they have "enough time" to do anything "properly"? Does anyone in any organisation (all of which could do with more money, needless to say)? If you tallied up the "good causes" (NHS and otherwise) which the BBC plugs every day, the tax rate in the UK would soon enough be 100%.
Schools Minister wants to send some care children to private school (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
A pilot scheme to educate some children in local authority care at state and private boarding schools is being considered by the government.
Schools Minister Lord Adonis said it would be "money well spent" if exam results improved but only a small number of children would be affected.
The charity Barnardos has suggested eight out of 10 children in care leave school without qualifications.
Martin Narey, the head of charity, said this idea could help some children.
Lord Adonis told the BBC: "In the discussions we've had it's a number of schools both state and private, that already have expertise in this area, that are keen to explore the potential for expanding this but I should stress that we are talking about small numbers.
"We certainly do not see this as an answer for the great majority of looked-after children.
"We need to see that the solutions that we have are fit for the individual child.
"But for some children it may well be that the stability which can be brought about by boarding schools, which can cater for their particular needs, will be a great improvement on the status quo."
Mr Narey said: "One of the advantages is that it might be much easier to find them stable foster arrangements, because foster parents would find it much easier if they were taking children just in holidays rather than 52 weeks of the year.
"So some stability would be brought into their home and their educational life which could make a difference..."
On Monday the Institute of Public Policy Research suggested children in care should be given £20 a week to pay for after-school activities to encourage them to achieve better exam results.
It's amazing. Some charity squawks about chidren in care and the government jumps up with a half-baked idea which does nothing for most children in care. And if it is "money well spent" to send some politically correct small minority of a small minority of children to private schools "if exam results improved" (which they almost certainly would) then why not do the same for the vast number of children not in care for which the same statement would hold? And the IPPR nonsense is along the same vein. If it is such a great idea (which it is not) then why not give children not in care "£20 a week to pay for after-school activities to encourage them to achieve better exam results"?
BNP delivers leaflets in Arbury (permanent blog link)
The BNP (the British National Party or more plausibly the British Nutters Party), for some reason, dropped three leaflets through the letterboxes of (at least part of) Arbury today. The leaflets contain the usual sort of crap about immigration you would expect from the BNP, although it's not overtly racist (they don't want to go to prison). One of the leaflets asks the questions:
Heck, most of that you could imagine the Tories asking. Except that the Tories would have used "their" instead of "there" in the second question and would have capitalised "Union" in the fourth question. It seems that one of the "English traditions" the BNP are keen on is not being educated. And most of those questions could be asked completely independently of immigration. Most of the time on many issues most people "feel betrayed by the government".
One thing the BNP promises:
A future BNP government will give immigrants here who want to go back the opportunity of voluntary resettlement with cash incentives whereby immigrants resident in Britain will be encouraged, but not forced, to return to their lands of native origin.
Hmmm, are they really going to apply this to all immigrants? Most immigrants come from North America or the European Union. Perhaps the BNP will come true to colour and decide that the "incentives" should only be offered to non-whites.
UK councils starting to put electronic chips in rubbish bins (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Chips in bins which help councils charge for the weight of rubbish collected could be common across the UK within two years.
Three local councils are about to trial the chipped bins.
The Local Government Association (LGA) said weighing schemes will be commonplace if the pilots are a success and endorsed by government.
A think tank has urged a "pay as you throw" system as the only way to improve the UK's recycling record.
Figures from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) show the UK recycled or composted only 18% of waste in 2003-04.
The IPPR says the UK has one of the worst recycling rates in Europe, with only Greece and Portugal doing worse.
Mr Bettison, chairman of the LGA's environment board, said charging to collect non-recyclable rubbish would give people " a real carrot to recycle".
"Some people say 'what's in it for me?' Well, let's make it in their interest to recycle by helping them. In that way, we're encouraging them to recycle more," he said.
The chips would carry information about which address the bin belonged to.
The weight of rubbish in each bin would be measured by equipment installed in collection trucks.
...
The LGA has warned council tax bills will have to rise if councils have to pay big EU fines because of poor recycling rates.Councils faced fines of up to £150 per tonne of rubbish if they failed to meet targets under the EU landfill directive.
IPPR director Nick Pearce said that for the new system to be fair, rubbish collection would have to be removed from the council tax.
"The government should give local authorities powers to charge for collecting non-recyclable waste," he said.
"Our European neighbours have shown that where charges are commonplace, recycling rates will rise."
Charging rubbish collection by weight makes some theoretical sense. Only it should not just be for non-recycled rubbish, it should be for all rubbish. Of course the rate could be different for different classes of waste. (In Cambridge we have two large bins and two small bins, and one of the small bins is for glass and cans and paper, so there is plenty of opportunity for differentiation.) Unfortunately the EU elite (as typified by the IPPR) have decided that recycled waste is somehow holy and should be encouraged, and all other waste is somehow evil and should be discouraged. This is just plain wrong. There is an environmental cost to all waste, and the charge for collecting it should exactly reflect that environmental (and collection) cost. In Cambridge there is a special recycling round just for plastic bottles, and that consumes a huge amount of petrol. The bottles then get shipped to China for "recycling". The net "benefit" to the environment is almost certainly negative.
On a more practical side, charging for waste in this way will have some negative consequences. In Cambridge the bin men are so hopeless about putting bins back where they have picked them up that it would be easy for neighbouring bins to be swapped, and then you are paying for your neighbour's waste and vice versa. (Well, these days most people have realised that this is a problem so paint their house number on their bins.) And in some buildings waste is collected for multiple households in one place. You can just imagine the nasty arguments which will occur.
And expect more litter to be strewn here and there, because some people would rather just dump their waste rather than pay for someone to pick it up. Already in one of the side streets off Histon Road in Cambridge someone has been regularly dumping a black sack full of rubbish on the pavement. (Yes, the person responsible must have very particular circumstances, because rubbish is currently picked up for free.) Currently it is no great effort for one of the residents to pick up the bag and stick it in their own bin. If rubbish is charged for you can pretty much guarantee that would not happen.
This is a perfect example of extremely bad EU legislation being foisted on the UK.
Tories want to abolish stamp duty on share trading (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
The Tories have given their first major hint of plans for a tax cut since David Cameron became party leader.
Shadow chancellor George Osborne has told the Sunday Telegraph he wants to look at abolishing stamp duty on share trading, to help boost pensions.
A think tank's pamphlet is set to say such a move would put some £4bn back into the stock market, boosting pension funds, which are major stock owners.
But the Treasury said that would leave a £4bn gap in public finances.
The government abolished tax relief on pension fund trading in 1998.
According to the Sunday Telegraph, the centre-right think tank the Bow Group will say in a pamphlet out next week that cutting stamp duty would add up to £80bn to share values and boost pension funds.
"Of all the damaging things Gordon Brown has done to the economy, the single most destructive has been the attack on personal pensions," Mr Osborne said.
Repairing that damage "has got to be a top priority", he said.
"Sadly, simply reversing the pensions tax he imposed in 1998 wouldn't work, as many final salary schemes have closed.
"We need to look at new ways of repairing the damage and that is why I am particularly keen to look at stamp duty on shares."
Dumb, dumb, dumb. Why should the City of London constantly get all these subsidies courtesy of the rest of the country? Why should share dealing be considered more worthy of tax breaks than buying property (or anything else)? How are the Tories going to make up the finances to cover this tax break?
One of the side effects of removing this tax is that it will encourage people to hold onto shares for less time, which could even introduce certain types of instability in the market. Buy, sell, buy, sell, what the heck, it doesn't cost much any more.
If the Tories want to do one sane thing about stamp duty, they should propose to change the stamp duty rate on buying property from being absolute to being marginal. The current system is idiotic and unfair (courtesy of Gordon Brown).
Nasrallah says he did not think Israel would start a war (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Hezbollah chief Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah has said he would not have ordered the capture of two Israeli soldiers if he had known it would lead to such a war.
"Had we known that the kidnapping of the soldiers would have led to this, we would definitely not have done it," he said in an interview on Lebanese TV.
He added that neither side was "heading towards a second round" of fighting.
More than 1,000 Lebanese died in the 34-day conflict which left much of southern Lebanon in ruins.
The Israeli offensive began after two Israeli soldiers were seized during a cross border raid by Hezbollah militants on 12 July.
"We did not think that there was a 1% chance that the kidnapping would lead to a war of this scale and magnitude," Sheikh Nasrallah said.
"Now you ask me if this was 11 July and there was a 1% chance that the kidnapping would lead to a war like the one that has taken place, would you go ahead with the kidnapping?
"I would say no, definitely not, for humanitarian, moral, social, security, military and political reasons.
"Neither I, Hezbollah, prisoners in Israeli jails and nor the families of the prisoners would accept it."
Wow, there are not many political leaders who would be willing to state something like this. It's a bit worrying when someone like Nasrallah is more honest than the leaders of the US, Britain and Israel. Of course the point that is not stated is that he obviously didn't expect Israel to be so stupid and so criminal in its behaviour. You have to assume your opponents are rational, and Israel was not. This was perhaps because the Israeli prime minister, Olmert, had to prove that he was "tough", so launched an unnecessary war against Lebanon.
UN slowly rounding up troops to go to Lebanon (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
A senior UN spokesman says it is now close to achieving firm promises of troops to make up the full peacekeeping force for southern Lebanon.
Edward Mortimer told the BBC that significant offers had been received from several Asian countries.
These are in addition to a commitment of up to 7,000 troops from European Union states.
The UN has agreed to deploy a force of 15,000 soldiers to maintain the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah.
Well the Americans, via their proxy force Israel, has finally managed to get what they want. The European Union is now going to be part of the current Middle East quagmire initiated by the Americans (and the UK) with their illegal invasion of Iraq (one of the biggest, and costliest, own goals of all time).
Soil Association wants to browbeat tourist attractions into serving "healthy" food (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Fast food remains top of the menu at major tourist attractions across the country, a report has found.
A "secret mum", who visited 14 top attractions for the Soil Association, found most sites were failing to provide healthy food and drink choices.
The Eden Project and the Tower of London were the healthiest, serving fresh fruit and drinking water.
New MetroLand in Gateshead and Camelot Theme Park in Chorley, Lancs, were named as the two worst offenders.
How terrible that all these attractions give their customers what they want rather than what the chattering middle classes, as epitomised by the people behind the Soil Association, want. On a decent day out there's nothing better than a burger and a coke.
Spring is arriving earlier in Europe (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
A Europe-wide study has provided "conclusive proof" that the seasons are changing, with spring arriving earlier each year, researchers say.
Scientists from 17 nations examined 125,000 studies involving 561 species.
Spring was beginning on average six to eight days earlier than it did 30 years ago, the researchers said.
In regions such as Spain, which saw the greatest increases in temperatures, the season began up to two weeks earlier.
The findings were based on what was described as the world's largest study of changes in recurring natural events, such as when plants flowered.
The team of researchers also found that the onset of autumn has been delayed by an average of three days over the same period.
Nothing that new here, except that there is some quantification. And although the scientists do not seem to like climate change, most people in northern Europe welcome a week or two less of winter. Spring cannot arrive too early.
Surprise: cities are warmer than surrounding areas (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
The impact of climate change is likely to be more severe in major cities, with the elderly most at risk, according to a study commissioned for the Greater London Authority and obtained exclusively by the BBC Ten O'Clock News.
The predicted rise in temperatures in the coming decades will be exacerbated by what scientists call the "urban heat island effect", in which temperatures during heatwaves can be 6-7C higher in cities than in surrounding areas.
The new research, led by Professor Glenn McGregor of King's College London, analyses data from recent heatwaves and concludes that the risk of heat-related deaths is greater in urban areas, especially in London.
Well the Greater London Authority (GLA) funded this work and the result is so self-evidently true (cites are warmer: shock, horror) that this "research" seems more a political exercise than anything else (perhaps the GLA is trying to screw more money out of central government).
American astronomers want Pluto to be a planet (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
A fierce backlash has begun against the decision by astronomers to strip Pluto of its status as a planet.
On Thursday, experts approved a definition of a planet that demoted Pluto to a lesser category of object.
But the lead scientist on Nasa's robotic mission to Pluto has lambasted the ruling, calling it "embarrassing".
And the chair of the committee set up to oversee agreement on a definition implied that the vote had effectively been "hijacked".
The vote took place at the International Astronomical Union's (IAU) 10-day General Assembly in Prague. The IAU has been the official naming body for astronomy since 1919.
Only 424 astronomers who remained in Prague for the last day of the meeting took part.
An initial proposal by the IAU to add three new planets to the Solar System - the asteroid Ceres, Pluto's moon Charon and the distant world known as 2003 UB313 - met with considerable opposition at the meeting. Days of heated debate followed during which four separate proposals were tabled.
Eventually, the scientists adopted historic guidelines that see Pluto relegated to a secondary category of "dwarf planets".
...
Owen Gingerich chaired the IAU's planet definition committee and helped draft an initial proposal raising the number of planets from nine to 12.The Harvard professor emeritus blamed the outcome in large part on a "revolt" by dynamicists - astronomers who study the motion and gravitational effects of celestial objects.
"In our initial proposal we took the definition of a planet that the planetary geologists would like. The dynamicists felt terribly insulted that we had not consulted with them to get their views. Somehow, there were enough of them to raise a big hue and cry," Professor Gingerich said.
"Their revolt raised enough of a fuss to destroy the scientific integrity and subtlety of the [earlier] resolution."
He added: "There were 2,700 astronomers in Prague during that 10-day period. But only 10% of them voted this afternoon. Those who disagreed and were determined to block the other resolution showed up in larger numbers than those who felt 'oh well, this is just one of those things the IAU is working on'."
Boy, the astronomers of the world are becoming more and more of a laughing stock. The main body of astronomers who seem to be upset with Pluto not being a planet happen to be American, and of course Pluto was the one and only planet (as it was) discovered by an American. Perhaps this is not a complete coincidence.
Pluto no longer deemed to be a planet (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Astronomers meeting in the Czech capital have voted to strip Pluto of its status as a planet.
About 2,500 experts were in Prague for the International Astronomical Union's (IAU) general assembly.
The scientists rejected a proposal that would have retained Pluto as a planet and brought three other objects into the cosmic club.
Pluto has been considered a planet since its discovery in 1930 by the American Clyde Tombaugh.
The ninth planet will now effectively be airbrushed out of school and university textbooks.
"The eight planets are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune," said the IAU resolution, which was passed following a week of stormy debate.
This makes more sense as a proposal than the original one. But the public might well choose to disregard this (somewhat arbitrary but sensible) removal of Pluto from planetary status.
BASF wants to grow GM potatoes in the UK (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
A chemical company has asked for permission to grow the first trial crop of genetically modified (GM) potatoes in the UK.
BASF says it hopes GM potatoes could be sold in the UK within 10 years.
It says they would be resistant to late blight disease, meaning no need for spraying fields with fungicides, and could save millions in damaged crops.
But environmentalists say consumers do not want GM potatoes even if it means cutting back on chemicals.
The so-called environmentalists have to make you laugh. They have a religious hatred of GM food. They don't care even if GM food sometimes does some good (e.g. by requiring fewer chemicals). They don't have any real argument against GM food. So they blame consumers. But of course it is they who have scare-mongered the public to be anti-GM food, in the same way that Bush and Blair constantly scare-monger the public about terrorism.
And poor BASF. They must be pretty naive to think they can convince the scare-mongered public through rational debate and scientific demonstration that GM potatoes are ok. Well, maybe in 10 years the UK public will think differently, you never know.
Earth's ozone layer allegedly on the way to repair (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Leading scientists in the United States say the hole in the ozone layer of the Earth's atmosphere above the Antarctic appears to have stopped widening.
The ozone layer blocks the Sun's ultra-violet rays, exposure to which is harmful to humans, animals and plants.
International agreements were reached to end the use of ozone-depleting chemicals called CFCs after the hole was discovered in 1986.
It is hoped the hole may "heal" fully over the next 60 years.
Two of the scientists whose work helped alert the world to the existence of a hole in the ozone layer in the 1980s told a conference in Washington they were hopeful that the ozone layer was recovering.
...
The two scientists reaffirmed their findings at a news conference to mark the 20th anniversary of their research first alerting the world to the problems of ozone-depleting CFCs.The NOAA said the improvement in the ozone layer was caused largely by the phasing out of CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) from products such as aerosol sprays and refrigerators.
The production of these chemicals was restricted by the Montreal Protocol which became effective in 1987 - and is deemed a success.
However, the chemicals brought in to replace CFCs are themselves not benign, and are thought to contribute heavily to global warming.
This seems more like a publicity event than a real conference with real news, but at least the scientists are not claiming the situation is getting worse. On the other hand, the last paragraph contains the sting in the tail.
Teachers should allegedly not be worried about the risks of school trips (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
A campaign has been launched to encourage people to stop worrying about "trivial" concerns over safety and concentrate on real risks.
The Health and Safety Commission said unnecessary concerns over paperwork and the fear of being sued were being used to cancel school trips and outings.
Instead it is urging people to focus on risks that cause harm and suffering.
A set of guidelines on sensible risk management has been released to coincide with the campaign.
The HSC is concerned that too much concern over paperwork and bureaucracy will stifle learning and innovation.
They are taking the piss. The HSC is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Their entire remit is to put health and safety above all else, and to make the rules more and more rigid in time (because they have to continually justify their existence) and rarely is any cost-benefit analysis even done. And it will be teachers, not the HSC, who carry the can if and when something goes wrong on a school trip. School trips can quite easily "cause harm and suffering". There is no way to guarantee 100% that no student is killed nor seriously injured. Unfortunately the HSC and certain parents (at the behest of lawyers) seem to believe that safety ought to be able to be guaranteed 100%, and if anything happens then the teachers have to be blamed.
Climate change will allegedly make bubonic plague worse (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Climatic changes could lead to more outbreaks of bubonic plague among human populations, a study suggests.
Researchers found that the bacterium that caused the deadly disease became more widespread following warmer springs and wetter summers.
The disease occurs naturally in many parts of the world, and the team hopes their findings will help officials limit the risk of future outbreaks.
...
Writing in the paper, co-author Nils Stenseth from the University of Oslo said: "The desert regions of Central Asia are known to contain natural foci of plague where the great gerbil (Rhombomys opimus) is the primary host."Plague spread requires both a high abundance of hosts and a sufficient number of active fleas as vectors transmitting plague bacteria between hosts," the Norwegian scientist added.
Fleas became active when the temperature exceeded 10C (50F), so a warm, frost-free spring led to an early start to breeding.
The flea population continued to grow when the spring was followed by a wet, humid summer, the researcher wrote.
The combination of the two seasons' climatic conditions lead to an increase in the number of the insects feeding off the great gerbils, resulting in a greater transmission of plague.
The study showed that just a 1C (1.8F) rise in the springtime temperature led to a 59% increase in the prevalence of the disease.
It's amazing how almost every single science story these days has to have a "climate change" peg to hang off. The UK (fortunately) does not have much of a problem with bubonic plague, but here we've had predictions that because of climate change we should have warmer springs and drier summers (but we've also had all sorts of other predictions, with the weather in reality changing in all sorts of ways). Perhaps in Central Asia it really is warmer springs and wetter summers. Anyway, the research is interesting without having to dress it up in terms of climate change. And isn't it amazing that absolutely everything to do with climate change is bad, there is no good, or at least no good that anybody wants to report. Perhaps bad news is more interesting and more credible than good news.
Two bowel cancer drugs not approved for routine use in NHS (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Charities have criticised a proposal to block the routine NHS use of two drugs for advanced bowel cancer.
The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) said there was insufficient evidence to recommend Avastin and Erbitux.
But charities say both drugs are the best option for seriously ill patients whose cancer has spread.
They say the drugs have been shown to extend life expectancy by four to five months in some patients.
...
However, both drugs are relatively expensive. Avastin costs on average £17,665 per patient, and Erbitux £11,739.
Well the BBC does not state whether that cost is per year, or until the patient dies (so per four to five months), or what. But under any measure these drugs are not cheap. And they hardly extend life expectancy at all (on average) for this class of patients. So it does not seem like a crazy decision. Of course the NHS could spend a near infinite amount of money on drugs, and it is up to Nice to figure out how to reduce that tally to an affordable amount.
David Cameron wants half of Tory short listed candidates to be women (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Conservative leader David Cameron has announced new measures to make local associations put more women on their candidate selection shortlists.
Mr Cameron's initial measures have seen women candidates selected in a third of winnable seats, but he says the party must go "further" and "faster".
So he now wants two of the final four candidates short listed for selection in each constituency to be women.
Mr Cameron said he would review whether more action was needed later this year.
He did not rule out the idea of imposing all-women shortlists, which were used by Labour.
But he said he thought they were a "step too far".
"The problem with all women shortlists is you are really denying the ultimate choice to the constituency," he said.
The only way to do this fairly is to treat sitting MPs and prospective MPs the same. So if they want half of new MPs to be women they should also insist that half of existing MPs be women. And the only way to do that is to deselect almost all MPs and start again. Otherwise the people who have benefitted from alleged past discrimination against women (i.e. sitting male MPs) are the one group who are not penalised for that discrimination. Instead it is prospective male MPs who are penalised.
Airline passengers manage to kick two "Arabic" people off a plane (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Passengers on a Manchester-bound flight have described how two men were removed from the plane because they were acting suspiciously and speaking Arabic.
Heath Schofield, a passenger on the flight from Malaga, described it as being a "bit like Chinese whispers".
Monarch Airlines said passengers had demanded the men were removed because they were acting suspiciously.
Birmingham MP Khalid Mahmood said it was disgraceful the pair seemed to have been judged on their skin colour.
The pair - reported to be of Asian or Middle Eastern appearance - were taken from Wednesday's flight ZB 613 and questioned but were allowed to fly back to the UK later in the week.
Unbelievable, but rather predictable given the utter hysteria generated by the government and certain sections of the media against Muslims. (And of course, as far as many Brits are concerned, anyone who is of "Asian or Middle Eastern appearance", i.e. not white and not black, must be Muslim, and therefore a terrorism suspect. The police killed a Brazilian on the very same theory.)
Stephen Byers wants inheritance tax to be scrapped (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Former cabinet minister Stephen Byers has called for inheritance tax to be scrapped, calling it "a penalty on hard work, thrift and enterprise".
He told the Sunday Telegraph abolishing the tax would show middle class Labour voters they had not been forgotten.
..
But a Treasury spokesperson said: "Inheritance tax is a fair and necessary means of raising revenue for public services, and only affects the top 6% of all estates."Anyone who wants to abolish it needs to explain exactly how they plan to fund the £3.6bn cost - the equivalent to more than 1p on income tax, or 18p on petrol duty, and almost double what we are spending this year on counter-terrorism and security."
...
Inheritance tax affects estates which are valued at more than £285,000 - but the government intends to further increase the threshold to £325,000 by 2010.The number of people who have been forced to pay inheritance tax has more than doubled since 1997, leading to charges that the government has used it as a stealth tax.
Inheritance tax should be abolished first and foremost because it is unfair. Spouses and homosexual civil partners pay no inheritance tax, but everybody else does. Why should these two groups of people be exempt? Of course the claim is that if one spouse (or civil partner) dies then it would be dreadful if the other was forced to sell the family house as a result. But there are plenty of other people in exactly the same circumstance, who are not exempt. Unless the government is willing to make the tax fair, it should be abolished.
And the claim by the Treasury that only 6% of estates are affected is disingenous (as usual). They know full well that that number will rocket in the coming decades, which is Byers' real point. And the Treasury is taking the piss when they point out the comparisons between inheritance tax and "what we are spending this year on counter-terrorism and security". If it was not for (the illegal and) extremely expensive war in Iraq (expensive both directly on location and indirectly through the required increase in counter-terrorism and security in the UK), the Treasury would be in a lot better shape to afford to reduce all sorts of stealth taxes.
Tories want to screw car drivers and air passengers (permanent blog link)
The Financial Times says (subscription service):
The Conservatives are considering a radical overhaul of transport policy in an attempt to embrace "the principles of eco-taxation", according to Steve Norris, the former minister charged with reforming the party's manifesto on the subject.
The party needs to re-examine its reputation as the "motorist's friend," said Mr Norris, the former transport minister who is leading the Tories' transport working party. He is also proposing that the Conservatives should put an increased levy on short-haul air travel, arguing that the "polluter" should pay for refusing to make short or medium length international journeys by rail.
Between 1975 and 2004 there was an 11 per cent drop in real terms in motoring costs; a 60 per cent rise in bus fares; and a 70 per cent rise in train fares, Mr Norris said.
"That's absolutely wrong. What eco-taxation needs to do is fundamentally [to] address the gap simply by removing the distortion in the marketplace at the moment, which doesn't internalise the real costs to the environment of emissions," he said in an interview with The Guardian.
On motoring policy, Mr Norris suggested the Tories need to move away from their long-standing reputation for being "the provisional wing of the Automobile Association".
Mr Norris also suggested that air passenger duty could be graded to charge more for the first 500km, with costs tapering after that. "Under 500km, we should really be looking at making those journeys by high-speed rail."
Referring to the owners of Ryanair and EasyJet, he said: "Mr O'Leary won't like this, Sir Stelios won't like this, but every environmentalist will regard this as absolutely essential. You do have to avoid creating a culture based on cheap aviation which will be as pernicious as the way of life based on car ownership has been in terms of urban planning. We've now got a generation living in France, working three days a week here, [which] thinks nothingof going to Prague fora stag night."
Dear oh dear, the Tories seem intent on going one step forward and two steps backwards. It must be dreadful for the ruling elite like Norris to see the ordinary workers of Britain being able to afford to fly abroad for holiday, which once only the rich toffs like Norris could afford to do. Ryanair and Easyjet are two of the best run transport companies in the world, and it's a pity Norris chooses to denigrate their performance in order to curry favour with a few Guardian readers. If only the British train network were run half as efficiently as Ryanair and Easyjet.
Motorists are the only group in Britain who pay their own way, in particular who pay an (extortionate) carbon tax (in fuel duty). Bus passengers and train passengers do not (their fares are still subsidised by the State, and that is just operational costs, ignoring the environmental costs). So bus and train passengers should pay more, and car drivers less.
And airline duty should be determined by the amount of fuel consumed, not by the distance flown. Norris's proposed idiotic policy of choosing an arbitrary cutoff point of 500 km for an arbitrary tax which bears no relation to environmental damage is equivalent to the 1960s and 1970s British government habit of trying to pick winners in trade and industry. Government should not bias taxation to pick winners. And Britain is an island with only one external rail connection, so there are many air routes from cities in Britain to cities on the Continent for which the air route is less than 500 km but also much, much shorter than the train route.
The principle of "eco-taxation" is simple. It should be proportional to the (alleged) environmental damage and it should be the same proportionality constant for all producers of equal environmental damage, not just for certain things which the ruling elite happen not to like at a given moment in time. Cars, airplanes, buses, trains, electricity and gas consumption should all be treated equally. Every tonne of CO2 emitted should be taxed the same as every other tonne. (Of course there can be taxes related to other environmental damage.) Unfortunately the ruling elite have chosen to get hysterical about cars and airplanes and let all other polluters get away with murder.
If the ruling elite (in particular MPs) think car and air transport is so horrid, they should promise never to drive or fly ever again, and stop being such utter hypocrites.
Protection can lead to things being demolished (permanent blog link)
Tim Harford in the Financial Times says (subscription service):
The view from my upstairs window in Hackney has changed a little now that the beautiful old neighbourhood church has been flattened. The church disappeared almost overnight despite attempts to preserve it - or, more accurately, because of attempts to preserve it. No surprise to an economist, but what”s going on?
The story is simple. Hackney Council was discussing the possibility of extending a conservation area to include the church. Once that happened, it would be difficult to get permission to demolish the church and build something else. The developers weren”t stupid, and knocked the old building down while they still could.
In the US, the Endangered Species Act of 1973 gives broad powers to federal agencies to restrict development in order to protect species. This can produce the same perverse incentives as Hackney”s conservation area. Economists Dean Lueck and Jeffrey Michael studied what happened when the rare red-cockaded woodpecker was discovered in commercially valuable forests in North Carolina. Forest owners who were unwilling landlords to the woodpecker were, of course, not allowed to cut timber. But woodpeckers tend to move about, so there are no prizes for guessing that the forest near the woodpecker, but outside the restricted zone, was cleared immediately.
Michael Margolis, Daniel Osgood and John List found a similar situation in Arizona regarding rare pygmy owls. In 1997, developers discovered that large tracts of land near Tucson were about to be designated "critical habitat", which would mean restrictions on development. Naturally, the developers didn”t wait.
...
One solution is to introduce temporary restrictions without notice and then start a process of consultation as to whether they should be made permanent. That is far too draconian for my tastes, especially since "temporary" regulations usually aren”t.A better idea is for governments to preserve land or buildings not by regulating but by buying it. That sounds expensive, but in fact simply transfers the expense from the property owner to the government that wishes to take away his property rights. It might persuade government to be a little more selective with its regulations - before deciding whether to preserve old churches or rare woodpeckers, we should be willing to pay the going rate to do so.
This is far too sensible an article for the chattering classes who run Britain to understand. Designating something as protected (where once it was not) is State theft. (The State should compensate owners when this happens, but it never does, so that is theft.) Far too much is preserved in Britain, but that's partly because the bureaucrats who determine what is preserved have to justify their existence and partly because they believe the world should be frozen in time.
Tories want more homes with gardens (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
The Tories have launched a campaign to build more family homes with gardens - instead of "pokey one-bedroom flats".
They claim planning rules brought in by John Prescott could spell the end for back gardens and lead to suburban neighbourhoods being concreted over.
They want an end to "rigid" planning rules which cram buildings together.
...
The Tories say there is "growing concern about how John Prescott's planning rules are leading to leafy gardens being dug up and replaced with soulless and ugly blocks of flats".Shadow local government secretary Caroline Spelman the price of family homes was being "artificially inflated" because developers were being "forced" to build flats.
And what the public really wanted were "family homes with sufficient parking spaces and gardens for children to play in," she added.
Amazing, one of the political parties has finally stated the obvious. Of course the urban planning elite hate this view, because they think everybody (but themselves) should be housed in high density urban slums. In Cambridge there are few houses being built, except on the outskirt of town, and those are all rather dreadful, with tiny gardens. But there are zillions of new flats going up, and mostly for London commuters, so not even that helpful for the housing situation for Cambridge workers. Not everybody wants a decent garden, but a lot of people do, and the current situation means that hardly any houses of that kind are being built. The result is that the housing stock of Britain continues to decline in overall quality. (Well, the new houses are hopefully at least more energy efficient than the existing stock, but that is about their only advantage.)
UK bird numbers go up and down (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
The latest health check on UK bird numbers paints an alarming picture of decline in several threatened species.
Of 26 bird species targeted for special conservation efforts in 1995, nine - including the song thrush - are bouncing back.
But the rest - including the skylark and turtle dove - are either still in decline or have only stable numbers.
The State of the UK's Birds report was published by three conservation groups and four government agencies.
The report suggests that most of the rare species have increased, while the more widespread species have generally continued to decline.
Nothing really new here. And the question is whether this is important enough to deserve special attention (including funding).
Baby boomers are allegedly horrible (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Baby boomers like to trumpet their generation's achievements. But their fondness for conspicuous consumption and foreign travel has led to many a modern-day ill, from rising debt to environmental woes.
...
Now, as the boomers become "ageing hipsters", we're constantly being reminded of their achievements.They gave us rock 'n' roll (which might explain the recent book, Baby Boomers and Hearing Loss), mod cons, the space race, computer science, and a rebellious disregard for the stiff-upper-lipped attitudes of earlier generations.
But did the baby boomers also leave behind a negative, even destructive legacy?
With their thirst for "stuff" - bigger houses, better cars, tastier grub - did they give rise to a culture of selfish consumption?
And by challenging old-fashioned moralism, did they inadvertently nurture a climate of promiscuity - even fuelling the spread of STDs?
More nonsense about the baby boomers from the chattering classes (here, who happen to be employed by the BBC). Baby boomers are exactly like all other humans throughout history. They want a better life for themselves and their children. And there are plenty of great baby boomers just like there are plenty of horrid ones, as with all generations. Of course some people have books or articles to flog and the best they can come up with is some drivel about how dreadful baby boomers are. The authors would do better to look in the mirror.
Cameron talks about housing without offering any solutions (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Council and housing association tenants would be able to convert rent payments into mortgage instalments under a Tory idea to expand home ownership.
The plan would be a successor to Mrs Thatcher's "right-to-buy" scheme which led to a "huge change" for 2.5 million people in the '80s, David Cameron said.
It was a "natural aspiration" to own property and it was wrong for it to be out of reach for many people, he added.
...
Mr Cameron conceded that his intention to "create a whole new generation of homeowners" would reduce the stock of social housing, and this would need to be addressed.But the advantage was that millions of people would acquire "an asset for their lives".
He also called for the planning system to be altered.
"People know there is a need for new homes - they don't want their kids to be priced out of the market, they don't want their local school to close, they don't want to live in dying communities," he said.
"But nor do they want to be overwhelmed by a rash of ugly, insensitive developments built on the back of some bogus consultation."
...
For the Lib Dems, housing spokesman Dan Rogerson suggested it would be better to give communities the power "to come up with innovative solutions to their housing problems" and not just "recycle old Thatcherite policies"."Simply extending 'right-to-buy' would only diminish the supply of social housing and do nothing to tackle the real issue, which is the shortage of decent, affordable homes," he said.
The "right-to-buy" scheme was a disaster for Britain. It meant a few lucky "poor" people became rich almost overnight as a result of buying their home for much less than it was worth. And it indeed vastly reduced the social housing supply in the UK (but what the "correct" amount of that should be is another question). So the first suggestion of Cameron is indeed rather silly, and also irrelevant. On the other hand, at least he recognises that part of the problem is the planning system. In particular it is the strait-jacket of the arbitrary greenbelt system, which no political party has yet faced up to. The greenbelt system in turns means that the price of building land (in much of the country) is extortionate, and that is the fundamental reason no "decent" housing is affordable. (Well, what the Lib Dems mean by "decent" is not what most people in Britain would call "decent". The Lib Dems, like most of the ruling elite, think that the people of Britain should live in high density urban slums, whereas most people want to live in suburbs or rural areas.)
John Reid plays the terrorism card yet again (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
UK Home Secretary John Reid has said Europe faced a "persistent and very real" threat from terrorism, after a meeting with EU counterparts in London.
But he said the presence of five other interior ministers and top EU officials symbolised Europe's determination to stand together and defend their values.
...
He said the talks had discussed practical measures in four areas:
- Tackling liquid explosives
- Co-ordination of transport security
- Exchange of intelligence
- The nature of European Islam
The world was faced by a form of "intolerant and violent totalitarianism", he added, which was subverting a religion, Islam, whose very name stood for peace.
Where would the world be without John Reid. Europe has faced a "persistent and very real" threat from terrorism as long as most Europeans have been alive. His comments are the usual irrelevant banalities we expect from the Blair government. Of course he made no mention that British (i.e. American) foreign policy has made the situation much, much worse than it would be otherwise. In particular, if he wants to talk about violence, he can look no further than the shambles of the American and British occupation of Iraq.
Pluto is allegedly a pluton planet (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
The number of planets around the Sun could rise from nine to 12 - with more on the way - if experts approve a radical new vision of our Solar System.
An endorsement by astronomers meeting in Prague would require school and university textbooks to be rewritten.
The proposal recognises eight classical planets, three planets belonging to a new category called "plutons" and the largest asteroid Ceres.
Pluto remains a planet, but becomes the basis for the new pluton category.
The plan has been drawn up by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) with the aim of settling the question of what does and does not count as a planet.
Some 2,500 astronomers gathered at the IAU General Assembly in Prague will vote on the plan next Thursday.
"For the first time in more than 75 years, we will be able to discover new planets in our Solar System. This is a fascinating prospect," said Richard Binzel, a member of the IAU planet definition committee which put together the proposal.
Well what is and is not a planet is of course fairly arbitrary. But the IAU seems fairly keen to choose a relatively stupid definition, and the introduction of the new category "pluton" sounds like an April Fool's Joke. It's hard to believe these proposals will receive widespread acceptance. Most people who look at the science believe there are eight planets. Apparently the IAU is either afraid of irate ten year old Americans berating them for suggesting that Pluto is not a planet, or perhaps the comment by Binzel is more to the point, since this proposal opens up another way for astronomers to justify their existence by discovering new "planets".
Yet another global warming study (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Rising temperatures will increase the risk of forest fires, droughts and flooding over the next two centuries, UK climate scientists have warned.
Even if harmful emissions were cut now, many parts of the world would face a greater risk of natural disasters, a team from Bristol University said.
The projections are based on data from more than 50 climate models looking at the impact of greenhouse gas emissions.
The study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers gathered results from 52 computer simulations to calculate the risks from climate-induced changes to the world's key ecosystems.
...
Richard Betts, manager of Climate Impacts at the Met Office's Hadley Centre, welcomed the findings."This makes an important new contribution to the debate on the effects of climate change," he said.
"We already knew that we cannot rely on just one model, as different models give different answers.
...
"Of course it is risky to make these projections when models are continuously being changed, but we do have to make decisions on climate change now so if we wait for the perfect model we will be too late."The models give the best encapsulation of current understanding of the climate system, and are the only way of assessing physically plausible futures."
Nothing really that new here. And as briefly noted, it's probably already too late to stop many of the consequences that are discussed. On the other hand, if these very same scientists had the same climate models in 1800, would any of them had predicted anywhere near what the situation was like today? Absolutely not. And fortunately for these scientists, they and their predictions will be long forgotten in 2200.
Police want more police state powers (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Police are considering asking ministers for more powers to impose "instant justice" for anti-social activities.
The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) is consulting members on whether to seek the authority to punish people without going to court.
It has heard plans from one police chief for powers to ban teenagers from city centres and gangs from meeting up.
Civil rights group Liberty said that the suggestion was "a recipe for arbitrary justice".
Yes, of course we believe the police that this will only apply to "anti-social" activities. No doubt soon we will find that this includes people protesting at Labour Party conferences, or in other places that the government finds inconvenient. Once upon a time anyone asking for these powers would have been treated with the scorn they deserve. Unfortunately with New Labour (and with the Tories and Lib Dems not far behind) this will undoubtedly instead be treated seriously. It's about time that the UK ruling elite once again started to at least pretend that they believe in the rule of law, not in the rule of dictatorship, where you can be punished at the whim of some government official.
House building begins at Arbury Park (permanent blog link)
The Cambridge Evening News says:
Work is set to begin on building hundreds of affordable homes after roads and utilities were completed.
Major infrastructure works at Arbury Park, which will see 900 homes built by 2011, have been finished on time and on budget by contractor Galliford Try.
The company began constructing new roads, installing utility services and making changes to the surrounding roads, linking into the development in September 2005.
Housebuilding can now begin and the first properties are expected to be complete by early next year.
...
David Cowans, Places for People chief executive, said: "The economic growth in Cambridgeshire has made it an attractive place for people to live and work. Yet that growth has highlighted increasing concerns over affordability, with average house prices outstripping wages by up to seven times."Arbury Park will provide first-time buyers, key workers or those with young families with a range of affordable housing which is both sustainable and built to a very high quality."
Well, the first houses have been under construction already for some weeks. And they do not look to be either that "sustainable" (whatever that really means) or "built to a very high quality", rather they look like the standard boxes built all over the country in large quantities. The developer, Gallagher Estates, did a good job before the work started in making all the politically correct noises about the development. But already some of what they promised has not happened. Arbury Park (or Arbury Camp, as it was once known) was supposed to have a prestige building on site, in particular the HRCC, the Heritage Resource and Cultural Centre, which now seems destined to be put in the railway station development. And there were supposed to be offices along the A14, which amongst other things would have helped drown out the noise of the A14. But these offices are also no longer going to be built (at least in the short term) and instead we have a dreadful long fence along the A14. This is not a promising start.
Mobile phone forces an airplane to turn around (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
The terror threat to the UK has been downgraded from "critical" to "severe".
Home Secretary John Reid said the change was made because an attack was "highly likely" but not "imminent".
The change in the threat level means the ban on taking hand luggage on to flights from the UK has been lifted, although some restrictions remain.
...
Long-term changes to airport security checks outlined by Transport Secretary Douglas Alexander include the following:
- Passengers can choose what to take on to a plane, but any form of liquid, fluid, lotion or gel will be banned. Electronic devices, such as laptops, will be permitted but will be thoroughly screened.
- A medium-sized item of hand luggage will be permitted. This bag will be around half the size of luggage previously admitted.
- Searches of passengers and their clothing will be conducted more frequently and are to be carried out by hand or using body scanners.
On Sunday night a British Airways flight was turned back after a mobile phone was heard ringing at the back of the plane and no one admitted to owning it.
Unbelievable this. You can no longer even bring water on board an airplane. Hand luggage is reduced, as if that solves anything (and computers already were "thoroughly screened"). And, worst of all, a mobile phone can force an airplane to turn around. The terrorists have clearly won. It's fortunate that the people now running Britain were not running the country in WWII.
Lib Dems making a mess of the Newmarket Road area of Cambridge (permanent blog link)
The Cambridge Evening News says:
Labour councillors in Cambridge say building 12,000 homes on the Marshall Aerospace site will create a transport nightmare.
They were reacting to a study which said RAF Wyton and RAF Mildenhall were both possible options if the business relocates, freeing up its current site in Newmarket Road, Cambridge, for development.
As reported in the News, the in-depth study concluded the 1,000-strong workforce could be accommodated at either site - though Marshall's has not committed to a move as yet.
But Coun Lewis Herbert, Labour leader on Cambridge City Council, has criticised the homes plans.
He said: "It's crazy logic to build 12,000 homes first without transport plans clearly worked out and made public. Is there to be a new, four-lane south Cambridge ring road?
"How are they going to shift this huge volume of extra cars when motorists can't even move at 10mph along Newmarket Road at peak periods? We don't see the logic of putting the city's single biggest development in the area with the worst congestion problems."
Coun John Durrant, the Abbey ward councillor and Labour's transport spokesman, said: "Building this new town without sorting out the transport is like building a house without giving it a front door."
But Lib Dem Coun Sian Reid, transport and planning executive member, said Coun Herbert's remarks were premature.
She said: "If one accepts we have to build new homes then we have to build them where there is the prospect of a transport solution.
"The airport site is a very good site because it's close to where the jobs are in Cambridge. That is the safeguard against this becoming a 'transport nightmare'."
The good old Lib Dems, taking the piss as usual. There are not that many jobs near the airport site except on the airport site itself, so once Cambridge has (stupidly) closed the airport down, Reid's statement that the site is "close to where the jobs are" is just plain wrong. The Lib Dems are encouraging Marshall's, one of the biggest and best companies in Cambridge, to get lost, all so the city can dump thousands of (no doubt slum) homes on the site.
Meanwhile, in a related story the Cambridge Evening News says:
Radical plans - possibly including a tunnel - are needed to tackle congestion in Cambridge, council chiefs have admitted.
But councillors fear the solutions could include roads across "precious" commons and open spaces.
Cambridgeshire County Council is to conduct a review of congestion on Newmarket Road and Coldham's Lane, with major proposals to be put forward by next January.
Richard Preston, Cambridgeshire County Council network manager, told Cambridge City Council members at an eastern area committee meeting "radical plans" were needed.
The measures would focus on the Coldham's Lane/Newmarket Road junction, the Barnwell Road/ Newmarket Road junction and bus priority measures.
Coun Ben Bradnack, Labour deputy leader, called Newmarket Road the "Achilles heel" of the Liberal Democrat development strategy.
He said: "The proposal for 12,000 homes on Marshall's will generate an additional 125,000 trips per day and a large proportion of those trips will be along Newmarket Road, which is already suffering gridlock at peak times."
But he warned Mr Preston's "radical" solutions would "be likely to involve new roads across commons and open spaces which are as precious in east Cambridge as Grantchester Meadows are in Newnham and Trumpington".
The Labour majority on the East Area committee voted to request Cambridge City Council to carry out a full investigation of the causes and the answers to the Newmarket Road congestion.
Coun Catherine Smart, Liberal Democrat member for Romsey, said:
"It is acknowledged the combined impact of extra traffic which new stores had generated had not been properly analysed when the original planning permissions were given for Tesco and the retail park on the opposite side of Newmarket Road.
This was done under Labour's watch, in 1999.
"We are happy to look at how decisions were made in the past and see if we can learn any lessons from them.
"To say no thought is being given to the transport needs of east Cambridge is nonsense.
"We have been looking at possible solutions.
"Personally, the ideal solution would be a tunnel under Coldham's Common. If this is not possible, I personally think a road running alongside the rail line through the common should be looked at.
"At the moment, there is just a single line on the embankment, but there used to be two - so there is scope for development there."
Another Lib Dem taking the piss. It is beyond ridiculous to blame all the problems on Labour. In particular, the idiotic bus lanes on Newmarket Road (reducing the capacity of that road by 50% along a crucial stretch) were installed in recent years. But the city has indeed shoved more and more retail space into that area (and there is still more being added even now), which is the worst sort of urban planning imaginable. Retail shopping should have been decentralised (for example, there is no retail shopping to speak of west / north of the river). The idea that a (no doubt multi-million pound) tunnel under Coldham's Common will solve the Newmarket Road problem is a joke. The only "thought being given to the transport needs" of Cambridge by the Lib Dems is that cars are the source of all evil on the planet and therefore road space should be removed and then car drivers, the victims, should be blamed for the resulting mess.
The Lib Dems, perhaps the worst thing ever to happen to Cambridge.
Airlines grumbling about security measures (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
New security procedures have led to a fourth day of disruption to flights at the UK's busiest airports.
Ryanair has cancelled more than 30 flights from Stansted and British Airways cancelled a third of Heathrow flights and more than 20 from Gatwick.
BA has criticised operator BAA, which owns all three airports, calling on them to increase resources.
But BAA said these were "unprecedented times" and "the safety and security of the public is the utmost priority".
...
Easyjet said it intended to operate as close as possible to its full programme on Sunday. However the airline urged passengers to pack all items into one piece of luggage to minimise check-in delays and possible cancellations.Ryanair, meanwhile, called on the government to provide police or Army reserves to help carry out searches.
But the company said the measures should only be targeted towards the flights at risk or groups that posed a threat.
"The goal of these terrorists and extremists is not just to kill but also to disrupt the economic life of Britain," Ryanair's chief executive Michael O'Leary said.
"We believe that the body search requirement can and should be revised from 100% to the normal 25% of passengers without in any way diminishing airport security."
If this is what the airlines are saying in public, imagine what they are saying in private to the government. Blair of course wants to talk the talk and look tough on terrorism, but the government reaction has handed a massive victory to the terrorists, as well as causing ever increasing economic losses to the country.
Lib Dems propose arbitrarily punitive annual car tax (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
The Lib Dems are unveiling plans which they say would stop two million people on low wages paying income tax.
The party would scrap taxes for anyone earning under £7,185 per year, while its top rate of 40% would apply only to those with salaries of £50,000 or more.
Penalties on "environmentally-damaging lifestyles" would fund the changes, including dramatic rises in road taxes for high polluting cars.
There would be a top band of £2,000 on cars causing the greatest pollution.
...
In May, the Lib Dems announced they intended to put forward major increases in vehicle excise duty, but its policy paper - entitled Fairer, Greener, Simpler - is the first time it has broken down the charges in any detail.Any cars in groups A and B, generating up to 120 grams per kilometre of carbon dioxide, would be excluded from road taxes altogether.
The annual charge for vehicles in group E - including Ford Mondeos and Vauxhall Vectras - would jump from £150 to £850.
The class above, which features Audi A4s and the BMW 5 series, is currently £190 per year but would change to £1,500.
And there would be a £2,000 charge in top group G - for cars like Porsche 911 Carrera Coupes and the Renault Espace 2 litre petrol. It is a vast increase from the present level of £210.
The Lib Dems are more and more becoming the nasty party. As with New Labour, the Lib Dems will trumpet their income tax policies, and as with New Labour the real story are the other, stealth, taxes. The proposed massive increases in annual road tax are just pure spite by the academic middle class (i.e. rich non-workers) who dominate the Lib Dems. The annual road tax has nothing to do with pollution, you pay the same whether you drive your car one mile or a hundred thousand miles. The correct (and already present) "green" tax on cars is the petrol tax, which is already way above the putative level of any sensible emissions tax. Hopefully car drivers will remember at the next election that the Lib Dems are proposing to crucify them. If the other parties had any sense, they would hammer this message home loud and clear again and again.
Of course if the proposed policy actually had the alleged desired affect of making people get rid of their big cars in favour of small ones, then not only would there be millions of perfectly good cars disposed in a very short period, an act of environmental vandalism, but the amount of tax raised by the government would soon be vastly reduced, and so the tax sums would not add up.
Muslim leaders criticise British foreign policy (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Foreign Office minister Kim Howells has criticised Muslim leaders for condemning British foreign policy.
An open letter, signed by three Muslim MPs, three peers and 38 community groups, said the stance on the Middle East has put civilians at risk.
They went on to say that UK policy has given "ammunition to extremists".
...
Mr Howells told BBC News 24 the letter's comments were "facile".He said: "I have no doubt that there are many issues which incite people to loath government policies but not to strap explosives to themselves and go out and murder innocent people.
"There is no way of rationalising that.
"I think it is very, very dangerous when people who call themselves community leaders make some assumption that somehow that there's a rational connection between these two things."
The letter urges the prime minister to redouble his efforts to tackle terror and extremism, and change foreign policy to show the UK values the lives of civilians.
MP Sadiq Khan, who signed the letter, said British foreign policy was seen by many as unfair and unjust.
"Whether we like it or not such a sense of injustice plays into the hands of extremists," he said.
"As moderates we will do all we can to fight extremism. We hope the government will join us in this, not just by changing the rules on hand luggage, but by showing itself as an advocate for justice in the world."
...
A Downing Street spokesman responded to the letter by saying: "We should always remember that the terrorism affecting the West today has blighted Muslim countries for several decades."It certainly pre-dated our decision to support democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq and of course the September 11 attacks.
It is obvious that the foreign policy of the British government is dreadful, and has been responsible directly and indirectly for the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people (largely Muslims). And this obviously encourages the extremist nutters. Howells might wish to dismiss this as "facile" but it is the truth. And the "Downing Street spokesman" is just repeating the usual ridiculous argument that Islamic terrorists existed before 9/11 and therefore everything the UK government has done post 9/11 is irrelevant. Of course Islamic terrorists existed before 9/11. The Palestinian problem is a long-running sore, and the proximate reason for 9/11 seems to have been the existence of American military bases in Saudi Arabia. Iraq, an unnecessary imperial war waged by Bush for party political reasons, has unfortunately added a huge amount of fuel to the fire. Perhaps Downing Street should reflect on its massive foreign policy blunders which have contributed to the mess we find in the world today, rather than release silly statements to the press.
Security measures still bringing Heathrow airport to a standstill (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Stringent security searches which have led to long delays and cancellations at Heathrow are not sustainable, airport operator BAA has warned.
The airport cancelled a third of flights on Saturday evening in a bid to speed its return to a normal schedule.
Heathrow earlier came under fire from British Airways for being unable to cope with the extra security measures.
Meanwhile, Ryanair said the government should provide additional staff to carry out body searches at airports.
...
Ryanair's chief executive officer Michael O'Leary said BAA needed help from the government.He said: "If the British government is serious about defeating terrorism and not allowing the terrorists to disrupt normal everyday British life, then the government must provide the additional security staffing - either police or army reserve personnel - immediately to prevent London's main airports from grinding to a halt over the coming days."
O'Leary is far too kind about the British government. The government is great at grandstanding and theatrics, it is hopeless at actually doing anything to help resolve the situation that they themselves enforced with plenty of forward knowledge.
Greenland is allegedly melting more quickly (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
The meltdown of Greenland's ice sheet is speeding up, satellite measurements show.
Data from a US space agency (Nasa) satellite show that the melting rate has accelerated since 2004.
If the ice cap were to completely disappear, global sea levels would rise by 6.5m (21 feet).
Most of the ice is being lost from eastern Greenland, a US team writes in Science journal.
Jianli Chen of the University of Texas at Austin and colleagues studied monthly changes in the Earth's gravity between April 2002 and November 2005.
These measurements came from the US space agency's Grace (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellite, launched in 2002.
From these data, they were able to estimate changes in the mass of Greenland's ice sheet.
A number of factors contribute to fluctuations in the Earth's gravity field.
But once the influence of the atmosphere and the oceans is removed, the variations mostly reflect changes in the mass of ice sheets and of water stored in the ground.
Estimated monthly changes in the mass of Greenland's ice sheet suggest it is melting at a rate of about 239 cubic kilometres (57.3 cubic miles) per year.
This figure is about three times higher than an earlier estimate of the mass loss from Greenland made using the first two years of Grace measurements.
Dr Chen and colleagues partly attribute this to increased melting in the past one-and-a-half years and partly to better processing of the data.
Nothing that surprising here, but it's not very believable that melting has come anywhere near tripling in two years, so most of that change must be due to processing changes, and this is a good indication that the error bars for this new technique must be fairly large.
Flood-tolerant rice (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Scientists say they have identified a gene that will allow rice plants to survive being completely submerged in water for up to two weeks.
Most rice plants die within a week of being underwater, but the researchers hope the new gene will offer greater protection to the world's rice harvest.
Farmers in south-east Asia lose an estimated £524m ($1bn) each year from rice crops being destroyed by flooding.
The findings have been published in the science journal Nature.
...
Although rice production has doubled over the past 40 years, demand is continuing to grow. The crop is the staple food for more than three billion people around the globe.
It's early days but this sounds like an important advance.
Water wastage allegedly a serious problem (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Water wastage needs to be tackled to prevent the "devastating effects" shortages can have on the environment and wildlife, campaigners have warned.
The impact of the current drought in England has been made worse by leaks, careless household use and "needless" land drainage, they say.
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds' report has been backed by the WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund.
More stringent efficiency standards for new homes are among its suggestions.
Do you really need experts to write such a report? And is this anything other than the usual litany of complaints that the world is going to end unless everybody spends all their time worrying about things that most people have neither the time nor inclination to worry about?
CPRE cries wolf about new homes on greenfield land (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Many councils are needlessly building new homes on greenfield land, rural campaigners say.
The Campaign to Protect Rural England criticised 13 councils for building less than a third of new homes on previously developed brownfield land.
These include Milton Keynes, Harlow and Corby, which was labelled "England's worst recycler".
Corby Borough Council dismissed the report as misleading due to an anomaly in the government's classification.
The council said most of the new homes in the area were being built in two former quarries which were not classified as brownfield.
Chris Mallender, the council's chief executive, said: "What we're doing with local support is building new housing where these limestone quarries stood in preference to building on amenity green space or very valuable ancient woodland in the centre of Corby."
More nonsense from the CPRE. At least the BBC allowed Corby to point out the nonsense. More generally, the classification of land into brownbelt and greenbelt is fairly arbitrary. Marshall's Airport in Cambridge will soon be closed down so that Cambridge can dump thousands of new homes on the land (for no good reason). The airport is deemed brownfield although the vast majority of it is just grass, and so just as "green" by almost any sensible definition as most of the (largely sterile and economically unproductive) greenfield land near Cambridge. The situation at Oakington airbase with the new town of Northstowe is similar. As is the old Simoco site in Cambridge. Back gardens of houses are also deemed to be brownfield.
John Reid wants more dictatorial powers (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Britain might have to modify its freedoms in the short term in order to prevent their "misuse and abuse" by terrorists, John Reid has said.
He conceded that was never an easy request, but it was up to everyone to ask "what price our security, at what cost can we preserve our freedoms".
The UK faced its "most sustained period of severe threat since the end of World War II", the home secretary warned.
More weasel words from the Blair government. Perhaps Reid will kindly tell us exactly which freedoms he and Blair intend to remove. You can guarantee these will not affect Reid and his ilk, instead they will target Muslims, and will allow the government to lock up whoever they want for whatever reason they want, with no need to prove the victim is guilty in a court of law. And perhaps Britain would not be facing the alleged "sustained period of severe threat" if the Blair government was not perpetually supporting the dreadful actions against Muslims by the American and Israeli governments.
Yet another CO2 sea-bed storage proposal (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Storing carbon dioxide under the sea-bed could help to reduce global warming, according to US scientists.
The proposals involve pumping the gas miles underground then injecting it under the sea floor.
There is enough space for almost unlimited carbon emissions, a US team reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Previous plans to store carbon under the sea have drawn criticism because of concerns over leakage and safety.
Supporters of the latest idea say that it overcomes these drawbacks and can be done with existing technology.
Previous suggestions for tackling rising carbon emissions by removing the gas from the atmosphere and storing it underground include:
- Storing carbon dioxide in oil and gas fields, or coal beds
- Injecting CO2 into the deep ocean
- Chemically transforming CO2 into solids or liquids that are thermodynamically stable
But these methods have raised concerns, notably the risk of leakage from geological storage sites, and fears that C02 dissolved in large quantities in the ocean might harm marine ecosystems.
The latest idea involves pumping carbon dioxide gas down to a depth of 3,000m (1.86 miles) and injecting it below the sea floor.
The high pressure and the low temperatures would turn the carbon gas into a liquid that is denser than the water around it, says a joint Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia University team.
Experiments suggest that ice-like compounds would be formed in which the water molecules act like cages, trapping the carbon dioxide molecules within.
According to the researchers, this would ensure that the gas remains trapped in the sediment and would be secure enough to withstand even the most severe earthquakes.
"Deep-sea sediments at high pressure and low temperature provide a virtually unlimited and permanent reservoir for carbon dioxide captured from fossil fuel combustion," they write in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
"...We propose that CO2 storage in deep-sea sediments at high temperatures and low temperatures be considered along with other options."
The storage capacity is enormous, they add. In the US alone, annual emissions of carbon dioxide could be contained in just 80 square kilometres (31 square miles) of seafloor.
Some kind of CO2 storage is almost certainly going to be part of the "solution" to CO2 emissions. But only time will tell whether this specific variant is a resonable alternative. And it's always easy to bandy around statements such as that the "storage capacity is enormous". That is only one consideration. There is also the question of cost and environmental impact. Of course so-called environmentalists do not like technologies such as carbon storage, because they do not like the idea that "business as usual" is an option.
Local Government Association blames immigrants for council tax rises (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Sharp council tax rises may be needed in the next few years to fund housing and education for immigrant families, says the Local Government Association.
The LGA, which represents local authorities in England and Wales, says rises of 6% on top of inflation-related increases may be needed in some places.
It says councils do not get enough cash to fund the services because official figures under estimate migrant levels.
But ministers say funding is fair and based on the best figures available.
Ministers can well claim that the funding is "based on the best figures available" but that is not the point. The question is whether the figures are accurate. On the other hand, the LGA whinges every year that central government is not funding local authorities enough, and so always claims that there will be "sharp council tax rises" which are all the fault of central government. Using immigration as the main excuse is a clever way of feeding off current public anxiety (stoked by the media) as part of this propaganda exercise.
British households can allegedly be classified into 23 "e-types" (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Households in Britain can be classified into 23 "e-types" depending on their access to technology, say researchers.
E-types include mobile explorers, the e-committed and rational utilitarians.
The researchers, from University College London (UCL), say the profiles could be used to inform future policies on access to digital technology.
Every postcode in Britain has been assigned a classification which people can check online to see if they agree with the researcher's analysis.
"What really emerges is that almost all of the types have some interaction with technology," said Professor Paul Longley, who led the study at UCL. "In a sense we are all digital now".
The research, part of the Spatial Literacy initiative between UCL, Leicester and Nottingham Universities, aimed to build a comprehensive picture of access to digital technology in Britain.
The team used information from the electoral roll, the most recent census and data firm Experian to produce maps of Britain showing different levels of access and use of technology.
Each of the 1.7 million unit postcodes in Britain, which on average consists of 17 households, were worked out separately.
Overall they identified eight groups which ranged from the "e-unengaged" to "e-experts".
...
The research is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
It has long been the fantasy of marketing types that people can be classified by their postcode. Unfortunately there are varying household types inside most postcodes, so even the theory is wrong. And even assuming a homogenous postcode, any data "from the electoral roll, the most recent census and data firm Experian" is not obviously going to give you correct information about any supposed e-type. And the categories are simplistic (and will be obsolete in a few years), and most people probably fall into "none of the above".
Of course there are zillions of marketing firms (such as Experian) who will produce plenty of hype about how wonderful and discerning their data is. In practise, the reality is not so good.
For example, take the Cambridge postcode CB4 2HD. The e-type for this is Type A03, "Technology as fantasy", whose blurb says:
This Type contains many old males, some of whom have an interest in electronic technology and like to read about it, but few of whom use it for obtaining information or for on line ordering. This is a Type which has very low take up of cable television. Many transient people fall into this category.
Now let's examine the reality. This postcode is a mixture of youngish Cambridge University academics (all with vast experience of electronic technology) and some typical families, some older couples and some widowed older women. No doubt there is at least one "old male" somewhere in the postcode who falls into Type A03, but with only 23 categories and more than that many people in the postcode, the odds are high that this should happen. But most people in the postcode do not fall into this category. (And this postcode has few "transient people".) And no single category would work for everybody (or even most people) in the postcode. It's a pointless exercise.
Meanwhile across the road in postcode CB4 2HA there is almost exactly the same mix and demographics (surprise), but somehow the geniuses behind the e-type have decided that this postcode is instead the completely different Type D13, "E for entertainment", whose blurb says:
Members of this Type are not currently particularly active users of electronic technologies but are very interested in considering the purchase of new or enhanced products, from the range of mobile and personal computer devices. Many access the Internet using broadband and a high proportion purchase computer games. However this Type is less interested in using the Internet for shopping, seeing it primarily as a leisure and entertainment medium.
Again, no doubt they could find one person amongst the many households in the postcode which somehow falls into this category, but most people in the postcode do not, and again, no single category makes sense for this postcode.
Why is this "research" being funded by public money? It is a complete waste of time.
MPs produce another silly report on emissions (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Raising air travel taxes would only hit poorer people, said ministers as MPs accused them of failing to stop transport that fuels global warming.
Carbon dioxide emissions from aviation are set to rise five-fold, the Commons environmental audit committee says.
It says the government has a "fatalistic" approach to the problem.
But budget airline Easyjet said the MPs' calls for higher taxes would be unfair to poor holidaymakers and fail to make planes more efficient.
The MPs say transport is the only sector of the UK economy where carbon dioxide emissions have risen consistently since 1990, including a doubling in air traffic emissions.
They are pushing for tax on air travel to be charged per flight, rather than per passenger - and be extended to cover air freight.
And passengers should have to pay to "offset" the emissions from their flight by funding green projects elsewhere.
But an Easyjet spokeswoman said: "The idea to price the most price-sensitive and less affluent customers (i.e. the poorest in society) out of the sky as the means to reduce emissions from aviation is not only a blunt and unimaginative measure - but it is also unnecessary."
Better options included reforming air traffic control and ending state aid, which often funded outdated planes, she said.
Transport Minister Stephen Ladyman also resisted higher passenger taxes, saying those on good wages would still be able to afford to go on holiday.
"What we need is a system which effectively taxes inefficient airlines or taxes those airlines that don't invest in the more modern aeroplanes," said Mr Ladyman.
That was why the government wanted aviation included in the European Union's emissions trading scheme, he argued.
Planes are not the MPs' only target. They also want bigger penalties for drivers of "gas guzzling cars".
They welcome the recent introduction of variable Vehicle Excise Duty, which means that the lowest-carbon cars pay no road tax, while gas-guzzling 4x4s pay an increased rate of £210.
But they say the measure should be extended, highlighting calls for the top band to rise to £1,800.
Under the plans, lower bands would be at £300 intervals down to the least-polluting cars which would be tax-free.
How did the people on the environmental audit committee ever become MPs? They don't seem to have a brain cell between them.
First of all, complaining that emissions from air traffic has doubled since 1990 is a red herring. This increase is because more people can now afford to fly, and that is a good thing. The MPs might as well complain (and no doubt some of them do) that the amount of pollution caused by computers has doubled since 1990, since so many more people can now afford these, as well. Perhaps the MPs will continue with their brilliant logic and suggest that computers should be taxed to death so as to encourage people to return to using a slide rule or an abacus as "environmentally friendly" alternatives to the computer.
Secondly, taxing flights is completely the wrong way to go. (This idea is a recent silly Lib Dem proposal which seems to have been accepted by the committee.) Everybody with half a brain cell knows that what should be taxed is airplane fuel, not airplane flights. Taxing flights means that airlines with fuel inefficient airplanes suffer no harm in comparison to those with fuel efficient airplanes, and so there is no encouragement to substitute the latter for the former.
Thirdly, this is indeed just a bunch of rich MPs putting up two fingers to the working class of Britain. MPs are some of the biggest users of airplanes. They should cut back their own travel before they complain about the working class now being able to afford a flight or two per year. Even worse, many flights by MPs are paid for by the taxpayer, so these MPs suffer not one iota of pain if and when more taxes are put on flights. In the aftermath of WWII, the ruling elite of Britain took it upon themselves to try and improve the lot of the working class. These days the ruling elite seems to spend most of its time trying to screw the working class.
Needless to say, the spokeswoman for Easyjet makes much more sense than any of the MPs. Air traffic control in the UK is dreadfully inefficient, and sorting that out would do a lot to reduce emissions from aircraft.
Concerning Vehicle Excise Duty, the committee again seems to have transplanted one of the silly Lib Dem policies. Vehicle Excise Duty has nothing to do with emissions. You pay the same whether you drive your car one mile or a hundred thousand miles every year. There is an existing environmental tax on cars. It's called fuel duty. Cars which are less efficient pay more tax. This is how it should be. Unfortunately this simple concept is beyond the brain capacity of your average MP. Before MPs try once more to screw car drivers even more than the UK government does already, perhaps MPs should demand a level playing field and tax all the other source of emissions in the UK (e.g. domestic electricity and gas supply). Car drivers are the only people in the UK who already pay a more than adequate carbon tax.
These MPs are part of the problem, they are not part of the solution.
Ministers and civil servants gripe about each other (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Ministers and top civil servants have given a no holds barred account of what they think of each other.
An Institute for Public Policy Research report reveals anger on both sides about what they see as a lack of accountability and qualifications.
There is also a belief by many mandarins that poor performance is not being tackled effectively.
In a rare move, IPPR researchers have interviewed ministers and their current senior civil servants for their views.
The report suggests that while ministers are often not specialists in their fields, their top civil servants are hardly experts either.
...
Both sides complain that there is a lack of accountability for driving improvement, with failure going unpunished and success rarely rewarded.
Who would have thought it? Thank god for the geniuses of the IPPR for pointing out the totally obvious. And how much were they paid to produce this pointless report?
UK Transport Secretary wants national standards for road pricing (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Transport Secretary Douglas Alexander will seek powers to create toll roads across the UK, reports have said.
In a leaked letter in the Sunday Times, he outlines plans for a bill for widespread tolls to combat congestion.
Local authorities currently set charges - such as London's - but in the letter Mr Alexander says he should be able to set simpler national standards.
The Department for Transport (DfT) said it had no intention of imposing road-pricing on local authorities.
Ministers currently give their approval for local schemes like London's congestion charge.
In a letter to Leader of the Commons Jack Straw, dated 20 July, Mr Alexander argues he should set national levels to prevent confusion that would arise if different cities adopted different schemes.
Drivers would be charged on a pay-as-you-go basis, with black boxes in their cars working out how far they drive on toll roads.
"The main purpose of the bill would be to support our efforts to cut congestion and improve public transport, particularly in the major cities outside London," the letter said.
"It would also help to pave the way for a national road-pricing scheme in the medium to long term.
"I would propose reforming the current arrangements for approving local road-pricing schemes, providing better targeted powers to ensure that schemes are consistent with a national framework.
"Current legislation offers very limited powers for pricing on the trunk road network outside of the area of a local scheme.
"We are considering pilots on the trunk road network as an important stage towards national road-pricing."
Nothing that new here, and at least (for once) the government is thinking of doing pilot trials rather than just dumping such a radical and complex change on the country in one go. (For one thing, it can almost be guaranteed that the IT system will not work properly.) Of course the real question is whether these new road taxes will be in addition to the already extortionate taxes that car drivers pay, or whether the other taxes will be reduced to compensate. Well, since road pricing is extremely expensive to implement, and since someone has to pay for that inefficiency, it is pretty obvious that motorists will end up paying much more tax than they already do. The end result will be similar to what has been observed in London: the poor will be kicked off the roads for the benefit of the rich.
Archaelogists surprised that bones might not be ceremonial (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
The actions of a domestic cat have thrown up a new theory about ancient stone burial cairns in Caithness.
Archaeologists built a mock-up of the structures as part of an experiment.
Emma Sanderson, of Caithness Archaeology Trust, said it was found that a dead rabbit had been left in the replica by a cat.
She said it could mean that animal bones found in real cairns were not the remains of ceremonial offerings, as thought, but left by other creatures.
Is this an April Fool's joke? Probably not. Indeed television archaeology programmes are full of experts who claim that practically everything they find which they don't understand has some ceremonial or religious significance. No doubt 99% of the time a more mundane explanation is more likely.
UN finally gets around to possibly passing a resolution on Lebanon (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
The US and France have agreed the wording of a UN resolution to end the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.
It calls for a "full cessation of hostilities", demanding that Hezbollah halt all attacks and Israel stop all offensive military operations.
A BBC correspondent at the UN says the wording would allow Israel some freedom if it argues it needs to defend itself.
The UN Security Council has held initial consultations on the draft. Israel has so far reacted cautiously.
...
Israeli cabinet minister Isaac Herzog called the text an "important development", but said Israel needed to know all the details before responding.Until the resolution came into force, the operation against Hezbollah would continue, he said.
A Lebanese cabinet minister from Hezbollah, Mohammad Fneish, said the organisation would abide by the proposed resolution only if Israel withdrew all of its troops from Lebanon.
The colonial powers have spoken, only it is far too early to know if anything will come of it. And of course there is still the question of who will pay for all the criminal damage that Israel has caused in Lebanon.
Royal Society president wants more money spent on energy research (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
World leaders have been urged to put more money into developing new energy technologies to tackle global warming.
Royal Society president Martin Rees wants a publicly funded international research programme, he says in the US journal Science.
Lord Rees says a pledge to increase governments' investments in energy technologies should have been made at the recent G8 summit in Russia.
He describes a "worrisome lack of determination" among world leaders.
...
Public funding for energy research across the world has halved in real terms since 1980, and in the UK it is now one-tenth of what it used to be.
All fairly obvious stuff. Of course the reason "public funding for energy research across the world has halved in real terms since 1980" is that over the last few decades energy has been relatively cheap, so governments have not seen energy research as critical. The interest in the 1970s was because of supply, not global warming. And indeed the current skyrocketing price of oil and gas is more likely to spark a renewed interest in energy research than global warming. Needless to say, if the governments of the world spent less money on the mega-projects of astronomy (the research field of Martin Rees) and high energy physics, they would have more money for energy research.
Essex County Council wants to extort motorists near Stansted (permanent blog link)
The Cambridge Evening News says:
Proposals to make drivers pay for using their cars to get to Stansted Airport have been slammed by a Cambridgeshire business chief.
As the News reported yesterday (Thursday, 03 August), Essex County Council is considering the introduction of congestion charging or road tolls in the vicinity of the giant airport.
The council claims road jams in the area are on the increase and the problem will get worse when extra homes are built nearby.
Coun Rodney Bass, the council's cabinet member for highways and transportation said the proposals were "by no means set in stone", but added the idea could help to generate money to "aid the economic progress of the county and region", as well as providing cash for improvements to the transport network.
However, John Bridge, Cambridgeshire Chamber of Commerce chief executive, condemned the scheme as "worrying" and "totally unacceptable".
He said: "Once again, it looks like a case of lack of Government funding prompting a local council to look at alternative ways of raising revenue. It is very worrying, and totally unacceptable.
"It will simply punish the people who are the easiest target, the motorists.
"Last year, motorists in this country paid £43 billion in fuel duty - and the Government spent £1.6 billion on road improvements.
"If they want to bring in road tolls, they must be prepared to ensure there is proper investment in our roads, and also that there are proper public transport alternatives in place. That simply isn't the case at the moment."
Well this is just Essex County Council trying to extort one narrow class of car drivers, pure and simple. Perhaps the real ploy is to try and damage Stansted Airport commercially, or perhaps it is to try and get more money from central government. Who knows. But motorists are indeed already the biggest suckers in the country, sub